NERA is pleased to share recordings of our five-part ‘From Adversity to Advantage: a recipe for building a resilient business’ webinar series, which explored business resilience and provided practical steps, examples and strategies for small-to-medium-sized businesses, comprising part of our COVID-19 response initiatives.
Presented by Perth-based entrepreneur Bill Withers, the series focussed on the unique opportunity SMEs have to harness the characteristics of their business to build resilience. Having built a geoscientific data IT company with three founders to one operating in six countries with over 120 employees, Bill has learned a great deal about the capabilities needed to ensure a sustainable and resilient organisation.
Additional reading:
Thursday 30 April 2020
The impact of COVID-19 is being felt by businesses around the world, across all industries and stages of maturity. Leaders are required to navigate a whole new set of challenges while continuing to motivate their employees in a time of uncertainty. Having the foundations of a resilient business will set people up well to do this.
In this session, Bill Withers shares stories around the unique characteristics of an SME and how he built a successful and resilient business that survived and thrived through many boom and bust cycles over 22 years.
Thursday 7 May 2020
A healthy culture is critical to a business’s ability to be effective and adaptive for long-term sustainability.
An organisation’s culture is the shared assumptions, values and beliefs that determine how people behave. Any group of people who come together regularly will develop a culture — some will be positive and constructive, and some will be less so. Intentionally building a healthy culture is at the core of a resilient business.
In this session, we explore some of the stories behind the shift from implicit to explicit values and how they can be embedded across an organisation.
Attachment: Creating your Values
Thursday 14 May 2020
Your economic engine refers to the products and services you take to the market and the process for delivering value to your customers. It is at the heart of your business. If it isn’t robust and viable — it is likely there will be no business at all! The way you engage, deliver and support your customers is so important and can be the differentiating factor between you and other organisations offering the same product or service in the market.
In this session, we explore the importance of understanding and potentially innovating the economic engine for business resilience.
Attachment: Your Business Bullseye
Thursday, 21 May 2020
In a resilient organisation, it is important there is a high level of business literacy. It isn’t the responsibility of the ‘finance department’ or an external accountant to manage, it is the responsibility of all leaders to have access to, and be able to recall, the critical numbers, and that these are transparent to the entire organisation.
In this session, we explore strategies for managing financial security effectively in times of rapid change and instability.
Thursday 28 May 2020
For business resilience, organisation design and work-flow need to be well documented but flexible, so everyone has the same view across an organisation.
If you were to ask people in your business to draw a picture of how the organisation works, would the pictures all be the same? Would someone draw an organisation chart, and someone else a group of departments?
In this session, we explore how to map the key organisation functions in a business and the importance of creating a sense-making picture for everyone to align to.